Insights is not a news feed. It gathers analytical essays on the long-term evolution of EU regulation, written to interpret trajectories rather than to report events. Each piece combines legal analysis, institutional reading, economic reasoning, political science and — where useful — empirical evidence.
Closing a scientific question at the EU level takes more than a peer-reviewed paper — it takes a study report built on decades of weight-of-evidence practice, and proof that what was tested is what's actually sold. In today's short-circuit between media and science, neither the Ramazzini Institute nor ECHA supplied that before announcing its conclusion to the public. That's not a small cost: asking citizens to trust a verdict nobody outside the committee can yet check is exactly how public understanding of science erodes. How can scientific institutions stay trusted while their own communication becomes increasingly performative? — Op-Ed by Corrado Finardi
Europe already has three pieces of a resilience framework for food and water — a CAP objective, a critical-infrastructure directive, and a crisis-coordination mechanism. None of them yet obliges anyone to act. That's the gap worth closing. (By Corrado Finardi)
EFSA calls the novel food safe. It also cuts the applicant's target population, rewrites its specifications, and clears a contaminant carried at roughly eighty times any permitted food concentration.
Natural-language robotics could make human expertise scalable in agriculture. The real test is whether tacit agronomic judgment can become safe, traceable and accountable machine action.
Europe must decide whether to cooperate strategically on the bioeconomy with other regions that may already be further along. That choice raises a number of hard questions - starting with the most basic one: is being a regulatory superpower still enough to win the race against China?
EmpCo applies from 27 September 2026. With national transposition still uneven, businesses should review environmental claims, sustainability labels and durability information now.
Omnibus X does more than streamline pesticide MRL procedures. It changes the evidence, objectives and territorial reach that may support stricter limits on imported food.
Three Article 4 outcomes on banana-derived foods show why EU novel-food status turns on the exact plant part, process, composition and use—not on the familiarity of the source alone.
A practical guide to the PPWR: immediate obligations, manufacturer and supplier roles, documentation, transport packaging and the deadlines that follow.
Europe is building a policy for biotechnology and biomanufacturing. Unless Biotech Act II connects industrial scale-up to the food-law authorisation system, the route from European science to the European market will remain incomplete.
The EU plans to apply a single Do No Significant Harm framework across its 2028–2034 budget. The decisive question is whether simplification can make DNSH a credible financial safeguard without reducing it to legal compliance or rebuilding a parallel authorisation regime.
Within seven weeks, TFA has been hit from two different regulatory directions—one measuring dose, the other declaring hazard. Where they meet is where MRL policy gets decided.
The EU has adopted its new framework for New Genomic Techniques, but its success will depend on clear evidence requirements, consistent Category 1 verification, proportionate Category 2 assessments, and workable EFSA and JRC guidance before application begins in 2028.
Compound droughts across the world’s major maize-producing regions are becoming increasingly likely. Biostimulants, organic fertilisers and biocontrols can help equip farming systems to absorb the growing climate shock.
Europe’s ageing and shrinking agricultural workforce may become a greater constraint on food production than land itself. Biostimulants, organic fertilisers, biocontrols and precision agriculture can help make every remaining input count.
COM(2026)380 is moving the EU’s Omnibus approach from extraordinary simplification packages toward continuous regulatory maintenance built around simplicity by design, planned review, digital tools and enforcement.
Europe excels at generating innovation but too often loses the commercial value abroad. The real test of the EU reform agenda is whether coherent, predictable and faster rules can keep scale-up, deployment and value chains in Europe.
